The Arrogance of Power

  According to a former cabinet secretary, Robert Keith Gray, “There were no executive secrets between Eisenhower and Nixon.” In part because of how he had functioned during the president’s illnesses, Nixon now saw himself as the president’s deputy. He attended two hundred NSC meetings and presided over twenty-six of them. His assistant for NSC affairs, Brigadier General Robert Cushman, brought him a full intelligence briefing every morning.

  Nixon, CIA officials had discovered when he sat in for Eisenhower, was an “apt and eager” student of intelligence matters. One of them recalled that he had a “vicarious interest in the supposedly romantic side of spying . . . like a child who wants to know what lies behind a magician’s illusions. Technique and detail were Nixon’s interests . . . how to open and reseal a letter without leaving any marks, or how to detect, move or install a bug. . . .”

  The agency had come to treat the vice president as its “friend at court” and made certain he received a regular flow of intelligence. This would explain why, when NSC deputy executive secretary Marion Boggs tried to carry out his duty of briefing Nixon’s staff, he found they often “didn’t see fit to talk to us very much.” Nixon’s more direct line to U.S. intelligence made such conversations unnecessary.

  At the NSC meeting on December 16, CIA Director Dulles said it was time to do “a number of things in the covert field” on Cuba. Behind the scenes, Nixon was also listening to advice from William Pawley, who had argued from the start that Castro should be killed. Pawley’s friend at the top at CIA, J. C. King, had just days earlier sent Dulles a list of four “recommended actions.” One of them, which Dulles approved, proposed “Thorough consideration be given to the elimination of Fidel Castro. . . . Many informed people believe that the disappearance of Fidel would greatly accelerate the fall of the present government.” It was the first recorded official reference to the assassination track. The notion of murdering certain other foreign leaders was to come up in National Security Council sessions, although always veiled by euphemisms. “Removal” or “dispose of,” for example, would be used, but never the word “assassination.”

  _____

  Eisenhower let the dogs of covert war loose against Castro, in a more general way, at a meeting in March 1960. Dulles told him there was no hope of living with the Cuban leader, and the president approved a plan the CIA had been working on for months. It called not for an invasion—that was to come later—but for the creation of a paramilitary force made up of exiles, a resistance network inside Cuba, and the formation of a moderate leadership capable of replacing the Castro regime once it was overthrown. The agency called the scheme Operation Pluto, after the Roman god of the dead. Castro was allotted a cryptonym, AM/THUG.11

  To Nixon, Pluto was a potential stepping-stone to the goal that motivated him more than the overthrow of any Caribbean dictator, the presidency. Thomas McCoy, a CIA man offered an assignment on the project, was told there was “substantial pressure coming from the White House to get the thing settled by October of 1960, so that this would not be an issue that Nixon had to deal with in the presidential campaign.”

  As Nixon viewed it, the anti-Castro effort could work either for or against him. Unresolved, it could be detrimental to Republican chances. Successfully handled, and at the right time, it would be a highly effective vote getter. In spite of Eisenhower’s admonition that Pluto should be held in utmost secrecy, Nixon spoke of the plans with four of his staff. He told his press aide, Herb Klein, that the toppling of Castro would be “a real trump card.” “He wanted it to occur in October, before the election,” Klein said in 1997. “The only people who knew his role exactly were himself and his aide General Cushman.”

  Some commentators have resisted the notion that Nixon was a prime mover in the Cuba project, let alone a party to plots to murder Castro. “By no stretch of the imagination,” CIA historian Jack Pfeiffer wrote in an in-house report, “was Nixon the architect of the Bay of Pigs.” Perhaps not, but Pluto did not evolve into an invasion plan until the last months of the Eisenhower presidency. Pfeiffer did note that Nixon and Bob Cushman attended dozens of meetings on Operation Pluto. “The Vice President,” he said, “had a great interest in the Agency’s progress in organizing the ouster of Castro.”

  The last U.S. ambassador to Cuba, Philip Bonsal, stated flatly that Nixon was “one of the earliest sponsors . . . in a sense the father of the operation” to topple Castro. In private, apparently, Nixon claimed it was his initiative. President Figueres of Costa Rica, whose country the CIA hoped to use for covert training, was often in Washington in 1960. “Nixon,” he said, “told me he had told the CIA to prepare for an invasion of Cuba. He called Allen Dulles and said, ‘Castro has to be overthrown. You try the best you can.’ . . .”12 A senior CIA veteran, Sam Halpern, has said he had the impression Nixon “more or less” became the White House action officer on Cuba. “It’s my understanding,” Alexander Haig said in 1998, “that Nixon was Eisenhower’s point man. . . .”13

  The agency officer who directed Operation Pluto was Jacob Esterline, who two years earlier had encountered Nixon during his Venezuela trip. He found the vice president a “heavy monitor” of CIA activities, through his aide Cushman. Howard Hunt, the CIA’s liaison with Cuban exile leaders, has recalled a luncheon meeting with Cushman and Esterline in the summer of 1960. According to Hunt, Cushman described his boss as the “chief architect . . . the honcho” of the project. He stressed that Nixon wanted nothing to go wrong, telling Hunt to call him day or night should he need “high-level intervention.”14

  It became obvious to many that summer that Nixon was growing impatient with the delay in dealing with Cuba. “How the hell are they coming? How are the boys doing at the Institute?” he would ask Cushman, referring to the CIA. “What in the world are they doing that takes months?” Nixon, with no significant military experience, talked as though the Pluto operation involved little more than some “rifle training.” Eisenhower, the veteran professional, urged caution. “He knew the perils,” Cushman said dryly later. “Nixon didn’t.”

  By September a top man on the CIA’s Cuba project, Tracy Barnes, would find himself confronted by a colleague asking, “What’s the hurry? . . . Why are we working our asses off on this?” Barnes knew, as did Cushman, that it was Nixon, focused on his presidential ambitions, who was applying the pressure.

  To the frustration of the CIA planners, who hoped to replace Castro with democratically minded Cubans, Nixon took advice on the matter from William Pawley. The conservative Floridian, who also had Eisenhower’s respectful attention, kept promoting the idea of using the far-right exiles. “Ike, Nixon, and Pawley . . . don’t know it,” joked Richard Bissell, the overall head of the CIA’s Cuban effort, “but we’re the real revolutionaries.” His men stalled the exile extremists, who complained to Pawley, and he in turn pressed their case with Nixon.

  Nixon became involved in one of the rightist intrigues, in a way that suggests a penchant for hands-on skulduggery that went far beyond what was permissible in an elected official—economic sabotage on the grand scale and later, allegedly, conspiracy to murder. It brought Nixon together with Mario García Kohly, a middle-aged exile who had been a prominent financier and politician before Batista’s fall. Kohly placed a special emphasis on disruption of the Cuban economy, a position entirely in line with that of Nixon, Pawley, and the CIA.

  CIA Director Dulles had been avidly interested in a suggestion made at a Washington dinner party by Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond spy novels. One way to destabilize Castro, he said, would be to flood Cuba with fake currency. Soon, at a National Security Council meeting, Nixon was urging economic warfare. Failing swift action, he said, the United States would soon be known not as Uncle Sam but as Uncle Sucker.

  Kohly gravitated naturally toward Nixon. By one account, his first patron on arriving in Florida had been none other than Bebe Rebozo, himself a Cuban-American who—Henry Kissinger would one day note—“hated Castro with a fierce Latin passio
n.” According to Kohly’s son, Mario, Jr., his father was in touch with Nixon within months of his arrival.15

  The pivotal contact came in July 1960, engineered by former Senator Owen Brewster, a conservative Republican who had once been investigated for supplying Nixon with illegal campaign funding. Also involved as go-between was Marshall Diggs, a Washington lawyer and former Treasury official who had long been in touch with Nixon on intelligence matters. Nixon met with Kohly, then put him in touch with Allen Dulles. A series of contacts with CIA agents followed.

  Kohly was to organize the printing of huge sums in counterfeit Cuban pesos, with the assistance of powerful accomplices. In the summer of 1960 Nixon’s aide Bob Cushman found himself on a plane with Dulles, flying down to Florida to discuss “a scheme to print Cuban bonds” with Pawley.

  The CIA operatives trying to forge a united anti-Castro leadership, however, saw Kohly as a handicap. He had delusions of grandeur, saw himself as “president-in-exile,” and was too right-wing to be compatible with the moderates the CIA wanted in its exile alliance. Nixon disagreed, describing Kohly as “a red-hot prospect to lead the Cubans.” He would remain enthusiastic about him three years later, when Kohly’s counterfeiting eventually got him into trouble with the law.

  Nixon was to ensure that Kohly received free legal advice, and would write to the judge in the case pleading for leniency. Rather than send the exile to prison, he was to tell a colleague, “they should give him a medal.” According to one witness, Nixon even told Kohly that “everything would be all right” if he could just hold up court proceedings by jumping bail and going into hiding for a while. Kohly did jump bail, but was eventually picked up and jailed anyway.

  Nixon may have helped Kohly not least because he feared exposure of his own role in a matter that did not come up in court—namely, conspiracy to murder. Kohly’s son has recounted an extraordinary episode that took place in October 1960—after the CIA had steered Nixon away from Kohly and when U.S. policy was shifting from support of guerrilla action to plans for outright invasion. Kohly, Jr., told of a telephone conversation with his father, conducted for security reasons on predesignated pay phones, in which his father described a meeting with Nixon at the Burning Tree Club in Maryland.16

  According to an affidavit sworn by Kohly’s son, Nixon agreed at the meeting to “the elimination of the leftist-approved Cuban [exile] leaders at a time when the island would be invaded by the exile groups trained under the direction of the CIA. This promise was made if my father would guarantee the use of his underground organization inside Cuba and his 300–400 man armed guerrilla force in the Escambray Mountains.”17 Interviewed in 1996, the younger Kohly repeated the allegation, saying it was clear that Nixon had sanctioned the executions of any exile leaders Kohly deemed leftist. “The way I recall it was that Nixon okayed it, saying, ‘When you go into Cuba, if you have to get rid of a bunch of Communists, go ahead and do it. If there’s leftist leaders there, kill them and let it be known that they fought to the last man. . . .’ ”

  Kohly, Jr., said it was also understood “absolutely” that Fidel Castro, his brother Raúl, and Che Guevara were to be killed in the event of an invasion. “Part of Washington went along with this,” he said, “the Nixon part. Many in the CIA were against it.”

  The details of U.S. plots to kill Castro have emerged in dribs and drabs ever since their existence was revealed by a Senate committee in the midseventies. Much of the focus has been on whether President Kennedy and his brother Robert were privy to the assassination plans, and to what extent. But was Nixon also involved? Was he even aware of the plots? It is a key question, and one until now much neglected.

  17

  * * *

  The determination to kill a foreign leader . . . is not only a sign of moral and political impotence, but an arrogant assertion of one nation’s right to control the destinies of all humanity.

  —Harry Rositzke, career CIA officer

  Trying to determine who authorized the CIA’s attempts to murder foreign leaders, said Walter Mondale after a 1975 Senate Intelligence Committee investigation, was “like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.” He thought “the system was intended to work that way, that things would be ordered to be done that—should it be made public—no one could be held accountable.”

  The Intelligence Committee did nevertheless establish the outlines, albeit fuzzy, of the agency’s murder plots against three foreign leaders. Poisons were sent to the Congo in 1960 to kill Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, although he eventually met his death at the hands of his own countrymen. Weapons were sent to the Dominican Republic in 1961 to dissidents seeking the overthrow of the dictator Rafael Trujillo, and may have been used in his assassination. As for Castro, the CIA tried repeatedly to have him murdered over a period of five years, starting under Eisenhower and Nixon in 1960.

  By the time the Intelligence Committee did its work, none of the presidents who had served during the relevant periods remained alive to answer questions. The committee made no formal finding “implicating presidents.” In spite of denials by Eisenhower’s intimates, however, the senators heard testimony suggesting that he approved the plan to kill Lumumba.1 The former executive secretary of the National Security Council, Marion Boggs, said in an interview for this book that Eisenhower also discussed the possible assassination of Castro. The president eventually rejected the idea—but on purely pragmatic grounds. “Eisenhower’s view,” Boggs explained, “was always: ‘Why should anyone assassinate the head of Cuba, Castro? Because we’d only get his brother instead, who’s worse.’ ”2

  Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA at the time the death plots were initiated, maintained in his memoirs that the agency “never carried out any action of a political nature . . . without appropriate approval at a high political level in our government outside the CIA.”* Other senior CIA officials have maintained the same. “Authorization outside the CIA for a Castro assassination,” the Senate committee concluded, “could, according to the testimony, only have come from President Eisenhower [or] from someone speaking for him . . .”3

  The CIA official in charge of anti-Castro operations, Deputy Director of Plans Richard Bissell, told the committee he never discussed the assassination plots with any administration official, having relied on Director Dulles to do that, and to obtain authorization.4 “What happened above his level,” he said years later, “I never knew precisely and didn’t particularly inquire. . . . No one would have expected to get an affirmative, an explicit approval from the president.”

  Dulles, like Eisenhower, had died by the time of the committee investigation. The responses of CIA chiefs who did testify, like Bissell and Helms, rested on the opaque principle that where assassination was concerned, the CIA related to the White House on the basis of the nod and wink rather than direct authorization. “I think we all had the feeling,” Helms said, “that we were hired out to keep those things out of the Oval Office.” With that proviso he testified that the Castro death plots were known “to almost everybody in high positions in government.”

  Only one man who had served at the highest political level and had had a special involvement in Cuban matters, the year the murder plots began, was alive and available for testimony in 1975. Richard Nixon, forced out of office the previous year, was by then ensconced at San Clemente in California. Yet the committee was unable to question him on the subject.

  The senators had certainly sought to have Nixon testify in full. In months of negotiation, however, Nixon insisted on his right not to answer certain questions, by invoking the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination and the principle of executive privilege. He also objected on the ground of ill health to having to come to Washington to be interrogated, even though he had recently been photographed playing golf. In the end Nixon was only persuaded to respond, in writing, to a number of agreed-upon questions. None of them dealt with Cuba or specifically with the Castro plots.

  The committee lawyer who carried the questions to S
an Clemente, Joe Dennin, said in 1996 that the arrangement was “the compromise between the perfect, which would have meant that Nixon testified like other people and sat for eight hours of questioning under oath, which wasn’t going to happen, and a grudging agreement to written interrogatories. . . . This was eleventh-hour stuff for the committee. They were ready to go to print, and there was tremendous pressure, a sign up on the wall in jest reading: ‘If you can’t get it right, get it written.’ ”

  “Nixon should have been questioned,” said former Senator Gary Hart, who served on the committee. “But this was a man in exile, and we had no real belief that under oath or not, he was going to tell us what he knew. . . . There was a kind of fatalism about it, that even if we went through the motions, we probably wouldn’t get Nixon to admit culpability. . . .”

  One of the negotiated questions did touch on whether national security considerations could justify breaking the law, if that was ordered by the president or a high official. Nixon answered in a way the committee chairman thought “pernicious and dangerous.” Certain actions that would otherwise be unlawful were legitimate if undertaken by “the sovereign,” Nixon asserted, evoking a peculiarly Nixonian concept of presidential authority. “Assassination of a foreign leader,” he went on, “might have been justified during World War II as a means of preventing further Nazi atrocities.”5 But assassination of a foreign leader, he claimed, was “an act I never had cause to consider.”

  In spite of his long-standing interest in Cuba, Nixon made no reference in his memoirs to the Castro plots, even though their discovery made headlines not long before the book came out. Thus, obviously, he avoided having to make any denial that he had played a part in them. Only in 1986, in a little-noticed magazine interview, did he refer directly to the matter. “I was amazed,” he stated then, “to hear that they had the assassination plots. I really was. Maybe that’s the way they operate . . . it’s a strange world, isn’t it?” Strange indeed, given what one can now piece together about the way that the 1960 Castro conspiracies interconnected with Nixon’s Cuban involvements.